The future of women aerospace engineers in academia - a numbers game

Abstract

The gender divide for women in the engineering domain in academia is still very large today, even though most institutions are committed to changing this. Although there are slow improvements in the number of women working in academic positions in Engineering, the Netherlands, in particular, is still lagging badly behind the rest of Europe with women making up only 17.6% of all full professors in the engineering domain and for 25.7% in the entire academic domain. This is despite many efforts across the board to improve this situation. The situation is even worse in the field of Aerospace Engineering and within this field, the lack of progress is not unique to the Netherlands with similar issues being reported in the United States of America and wider afield. This paper reports on research on the capacity building among women required within the aerospace engineering domain to reach the commonly defined critical mass percentage of 30% of women full professors using metrics on career progress and on as well as labour market data on the career development of Aerospace graduates to show where potential new interventions can be made.